As had happened in the House of Representatives, the Senate voted to approve the bill as a whole, without a separate vote on on whether to make changes to Selective Service registration. The version approved by the Senate would expand registration to women, while the version approved by the House would not.

The Senate bill is somewhat ambiguously worded, but it appears intended to subject women born after the start of the millennium to the same administrative sanctions as men with respect to Federal jobs, student aid, etc., if they haven't yet registered, or later in life if they don't register before their 26th birthday.

A bill can become law only if it is approved in exactly the same form by both houses of Congress and then signed by the President. There are billions of dollars in differences between the versions of the "defense" authorization act approved by the two houses, in addition to the provision in the Senate bill to register women for the draft and the absence of any such provision in the House version. So the House and Senate will each appoint members to a joint ad hoc conference committee whose sole task will be to negotiate -- behind closed doors -- a compromise version of the bill that they think will be able to get the approval of a majority of both chambers. It's unclear what is likely to become of the provision on women and draft registration in the conference committee, whose work could take several weeks or longer.

The bill proposed by the conference committee is then voted up or down in each chamber as a package deal. A bill can die in conference if majorities of the the House and Senate can't agree on a package of compromises, but that isn't likely with a bill like this that almost all members of Congress consider essential. However, President Obama has threatened to veto the bill if some of the provisions in the Senate version remain in version approved by Congress. Should that happen, Congress would have to either override the President's veto or try again to craft a bill acceptable to the President, in which case there would be another chance for amendments to provisions such as those on women and draft registration.

All this could drag on for months, although it would need to be resolved before the session of Congress ends at the end of the year, after the elections. If Congress votes this year to extend draft registration to women starting 1 January 2018, that will still leave the possibility that, before that provision takes effect, the new Congress that takes office in January 2017 could supersede it by ending draft registration entirely. In the meantime, 16-year-old women (those born in 2000) will need to start thinking about what they will do if they are ordered to register for the draft when they reach 18, and whether they will publicize their resistance. (Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help, or if you have "I Won"t Go" or "We Won't Go" statements I can publish or link to.)

If the provision approved today by the Senate is removed from the final version of the "defense" authorization act enacted into law, the issue will be postponed for the new Congress to deal with next year or whenever Federal courts begin to rule, as they are likely to do in lawsuits that are already in progress, that male-only draft registration has been rendered unconstitutional by the opening of all military combat assignments and specialties to women. Once that happens, Congress will have to decide whether to end draft registration, extend it to women, or allow it to end by court order (somewhat messily and with some awkward loose ends and follow-up litigation).

A recent poll (see page 131 of the PDF) shows that liberals and Democrats are generally more supportive of extending draft registration to women than conservatives or Republicans. Most of the opposition to requiring women to register for the draft comes from (sexist) conservative Republicans, not anti-war or libertarian feminists. Among Democrats, supporters of Bernie Sanders were even more likely than supporters of Hillary Clinton to support extending draft registration to women.

When President Carter announced his proposal to reinstate draft registration in his State of the Union address in 1980, some of the strongest initial grassroots opposition came from women. One feminist group adopted the following statement in January 1980:

The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom strenuously opposes the conscription of men or women for war or preparation for war and we oppose registration as the first step toward conscription.... Sisterhood is international -- it does not stop at international borders. If we embrace militarism and conscription as part of equality we will be declaring our sisters as enemies. That is something we as women and as feminists WILL NEVER do.... Sisterhood is powerful. Sat NO to registration; say NO to the draft!

The National Resistance Committee was founded at a meeting at the Women's Building in San Francisco within weeks after Carter's announcement. Many women remained active in the resistance to draft registration even after the bill approved by Congress was narrowed to require only men to register, though the press tended to focus on male draft resisters. A report on the anti-draft movement by the New York Times in August 1982 noted that, "Some feminist organizations are attracted to the issue. After many women's groups opposed President Carter's unsuccessful proposal for registration of women, they have tended to line up against the peacetime draft of men, too." (The same article reported presciently that, "Some antidraft activists ... say ... that if thousands fail to respond, the Government will not be able to track them down. 'For every one of those who openly say, 'I'm not going to register,' there are probably 50 to 100 who are doing it privately,' said Fred Moore of the National Resistance Committee in San Francisco.")

We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid. At the same time our cities are in ruins, bankrupt; they suffer the devastation of war. Hospitals are closed, our schools are deprived of books and teachers. Our young Black and Latino youth are without decent work. They will be forced, drafted to become the cannon fodder for the very power that oppresses them... We do not want to be drafted into the army. We do not want our young brothers to be drafted. We want them equal with us.

Despite this history, feminist, radical, anti-war, and libertarian opposition to registration and the draft doesn't (yet) register in current polls. That has made it easy to "spin" the proposed extension of draft registration to women as allegedly "feminist" and as part of Hillary Clinton's alleged "radical feminist agenda". It's up to us to change these terms of debate to consider the feminist, radical, anti-war, and libertarian arguments against subjecting anyone to draft registration or a draft, and the inevitability that any attempt to force women to register for the draft will prove just as unenforceble as registration of men has been.

"Opponents of the draft measure will have an opportunity to kill it when the House and Senate reconcile the differences between their versions of the National Defense Authorization Act in conference....

The time of the conference and the exact number of conferees from the House and Senate has not been determined. But Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who is guaranteed a seat at the negotiation table as the senior member of the Armed Services Committee, already announced he plans to strip out the controversial measure. Inhofe promised in a statement to try to remove, in conference, 'the unnecessary Senate language requiring women to register for the draft.'

That’s only possible because the House already stripped a proposed draft requirement from its version of the bill back in May. That makes conference, a GOP aide tells The Daily Signal, the best time to address the issue."

"When President Jimmy Carter reveleved his proposal to register women and men for the draft,... organizations took positions varying from WILPF's total opposition to registration to Phyllis Schlafly's opposition to drafting women. The National Organization for Women and the National Women's Political Caucus changed their posiitons from January 25 to February 8 [1980] from total opposition to the draft to opposition coupled with the idea that if there were to be a draft, it had to include women. The debate was on between feminists who believed in equality within male power structures and feminists who beleived in changing male structures of power, in this case, in opposing war and militarization altogether."

(Women Leaders in the Peace/Antiwar Movements, by Carolyn M. Stephenson, Institute for Peace & Conflict Resolution, University of Hawai'i, in "Gender and Women's Leadership: A Reference Handbook", SAGE Publications, 2010)

There is no such thing as equality on this earth and there never will be. Cats are not dogs and men are not women. When men can birth a baby from a womb, then the sound of equality among men and women might not sound so utterly ridiculous. Wages, nor voting (in a rigged system btw) does not equal to equality. And 'working in a kitchen' is of no less worth or value than the hunter's catch. The elites have truly succeeded in the dumbing down of the many. Neither man nor woman or any being should be coerced into the madness of the greedy warmongers who fool you into believing their lies. Make peace (creative), not war (destructive) - and you will be thankful when in your life review you chose the path of light.

Posted by: from the light, 15 June 2016, 23:14 (11:14 PM)

"Why the Senate voted to include women in the draft" (by Simone McCarthy, Christian Science Monitor, 15 June 2016):

"Draft Registration Has Hurt American Men for Decades. Now It May Hurt Women, Too. The Senate has approved making women register, but plenty of people want to get rid of the Selective Service system altogether." (by Max J. Rosenthal, Mother Jones, 17 June 2016):

"Many are applauding these changes as an important step towards 'equality' and recognition of women's capabilities. But the focus on equality is masking the underlying injustice of the law in the first place...."

"Abolish the draft as a whole. Then, THEN, we will have true equality when it is no longer possible for the federal government to force anyone's kid to go die for foolish overseas power gambits between various tinhorn despots we call 'allies'....

Now the government says, gosh, we might not have enough males to fight and win a war we start in the future. We might need all the females, too. Therefore, they must be foreseeing a war in the future with casualties in the millions....

See, people think we can just draft the young and ship them off to die for these mistakes we call 'foreign policy'. But the blood is on your hands and on your heads if you think sending young men just isn’t enough, so let’s send young women, too...

No, we need to call for an end to this insanity. When the government has said that just sending off the males to death isn’t going to be enough, but now they need the females, too, we should realize we're led by monsters....

End the whole draft registration scam. War itself is the enemy. Militarism itself is the enemy. These are concepts that must be defeated for a future to even be possible."

"There are important issues women continue to battle to achieve real, tangible equality. But finally giving them the right to fight and die under a policy they and most Americans disagree with is hardly a win."

"A Democrat and a Republican Go Head to Head on What Drafting Women Will Really Mean for the United States: If the House approves the bill recently passed by the Senate, women over the age of 18 will have to sign up."

"Women could begin registering for the draft as early as 2018, or the entire Selective Service System could be abolished by then. Both options hang over upcoming negotiations connected to the annual defense authorization bill, since House and Senate drafts of the policy measure contain dramatically different plans on whether women should be required to sign up for possible involuntary military service...."

"Recent legislative efforts to extend draft registration to young women have raised an old conundrum for some feminists. Does pursuit of gender equality include support for universal conscription?

While not all feminists are anti-militarists, opposition to war and militarism has been a strong current within the women's movement. Prominent suffragists like Quaker Alice Paul, and Barbara Deming, a feminist activist and thinker of the 1960s and '70s, were ardent pacifists. Moreover, feminist critique has often regarded the military as a hierarchical, male-dominated institution promoting destructive forms of power...."

"Enemies of the draft expansion [of draft registration to women] see themselves as defending an old and noble chivalric idea about the male duty to protect..."

(Completely ignores pacifist and antiwar feminist opposition to draft registration, and the role that women have played in opposition to conscription, even when only men were being drafted ro required to register.)

"Last week in Milwaukee the church's triennial convention passed a resolution, by a 946-89 vote, committing to support 'those who have a religious and moral objection to women participating in the selective service system and being subject to a possible draft.'..."

"We oppose the reinstatement of the draft, except in dire circumstances like world war, whether directly or through compulsory national service. We support the all-volunteer force and oppose unnecessary policy changes, including compulsory
national service and Selective Service registration of women for a possible future draft."

"Democrats and Republicans in Congress are digging in for a fight on defense spending that is unlikely to be resolved until after the election....

Little is likely to happen until after November.

Democrats, confident voters will deliver Hillary Clinton to the White House and a Senate majority for their party, expect they'll have more leverage if they wait.

'I think there's a small chance (but still a chance) that an NDAA conference report could be done in September and get vetoed by the President, but I think the final [NDAA] and defense appropriations [bill] will all get finalized after the election,' said Justin Johnson, defense budget expert at The Heritage Foundation."

Joint letter to the conference committee chairs and ranking minority members in support of
extending the current Selective Service registration requirement to women,
co-signed by, among others, the ACLU and the Natijonla Organization for Women:

"Lawmakers have officially dropped plans to make women register for the draft, instead opting for a review of the ongoing need for the Selective Service System.

The controversial provision had been part of early drafts of the annual defense authorization bill...

But conservatives in both chambers objected to the provision and stripped it out of the final legislative draft unveiled Tuesday....

Instead, the final authorization bill draft -- expected to be voted on by Congress in the next few days -- calls for a review of the entire Selective Service System, to see if the idea of a military draft is still realistic and cost-effective."

"Dropping women from draft registration may be a signal that the next Defense Secretary could reinstitute the policy excluding women from some direct combat jobs, such as infantry and artillery. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered the policy change in 2013, but since Congress never passed a law affirming it, a stroke of the pen could roll it back."

"The Obama administration announced on Thursday its support for requiring women to register for the military draft.

National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said in a statement that while the administration remains committed to an all-volunteer force, .. "the administration supports -- as a logical next step -- women registering for the Selective Service."...

The Pentagon echoed the administration announcement, affirming that the Secretary of Defense sees the universal draft as the next step in establishing equality across the military.

"While Secretary [of Defense] Carter strongly supports our all-volunteer approach and does not advocate returning to a draft, as he has said in the past, he thinks it makes sense for women to register for selective service just as men must," Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement.

"Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble." (U.S. Constitution)

"Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." (Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

"Liberty of movement is an indispensable condition for the free development of a person." (United Nations Human Rights Committee)